The attempt by BP to stop the oil from gushing out has failed per the news media http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_gulf_oil_spill

We all remember the Federal response to Katrina. I for one did not see how Bush could have been blamed for Katrina. I felt that…

1. People should have evacuated when told. NO has been under threat from a major hurricane from the day it rose out of the swamp and foolishly stayed in place behind dikes.
2. The mayor and the gov were more responsible for their own people
3. The media overplayed it and used Katrina as a hammer to bludgeon Bush out of ideological dislike.

I also do not think that Obama is to blame on the oil spill.

1. Accidents happen
2. BP is to blame
3. What is the President supposed to do? Get in a Sub and use the Force to stop the oil?

I do think though that eventually if the oil keeps gushing that the media will eventually turn on him. Fair or not that’s what will eventually happen.

I think the media is looking for a story. I don’t remember who the president was when Exxon Valdes happened. It’s terrible and sad but as soon as Lindsay Lohan goes to jail, etc this will be out of the news.

I do find it striking to hear Carville criticize a Democratic president. Maybe President Obama SHOULD have been more out front. I sure as heck think Bush should have done more when Katrina hit.

But I don’t blame him for all the deaths.I think we almost elevate our presidents to God status. They can’t make a mistake, even a wrong word. And they get the blame for everything.

The sad truth is that British Petroleum was allowed to dig this well because it was permitted during the Bush administration, you complete and total drooling idiots who even think of blaming this on Obama.

The Bush administration gave them pretty much complete control over emergency measures. It didn’t work. The only thing that’s going to kill the well are the two relief wells that are currently being dug. I just heard that BP stopped work on one to try some other pretend theater maneuver that will not work. We can blame that on Obama, I guess, for not stopping them, but I don’t know. Drill those relief wells, and bone up on your basic physics.

The Bush Administration came into power with contempt for FEMA. They put nonprofessionals in charge, drove out many of the seasoned pros who ran the agency under Clinton, and then added an extra layer of bureaucracy with DHS that required the hapless Michael Brown to go through Michael Chertoff to get to the White House. The first three days of Katrina, Bush stayed at his ranch uninterested in what had happened. The day Katrina roared through Louisiana, Chertoff flew off to a day-long conference on swine flu in Atlanta. This was an administration that not only led an unprepared federal government, but didn’t do a good job afterward until Adm. Allen was put in charge. I agree that the longer the current disaster goes on the liklier it will become Obama’s disaster, rightly or wrongly, but we need to keep in mind that the federal government does not have some secret technology here that it can bring to bear on the situation. In the rush to blame Obama, I just hope we will take some time to examine the governmental attitudes that led to lax regulation and oversight before this accident happened.

What happened in your example was these were people trying to leave NO a few days after the storm. They had ignored the evacuation orders out of stupidity or ignorance and tried to walk out later. No one was prevented from leaving NO before the storm. They may have been hampered by a pathetic local response from the mayor or Gov but lets remember that the NO SP managed to get all his people out.

Local police were afraid of looters from NO and kept them out of local suburbs. Which was probably either good or bad depending on who was being stopped at gunpoint. Some were looters and some were people trying to leave.

One thing that happens in these types of posts is that people use their own idealogical blinders and filter information thru them as demonstrated using half truths.

Bbell, if DKL can call people shitbags, why can’t he call people idiots? It’s his opinion.

If Tom Cruise had died instead of Gary Coleman, this oil spill would be on page 2 of the news.

Not that it should be but we are, to an extent, being manipulated (again) by media.

I talk to people from New Orleans every day and they’re all worried about the impact to local economy re loss of seafood product. Long run, this is going to affect us all in a big way.

Obama comes off uncaring, Bush made a lot of “uh-oh, missed that one” catch up gestures which seemed basically political in nature when Katrina hit, Obama’s attitude seems to be “crap, my advisors are making me do this and I’d rather be anywhere than here.”

Clinton and Reagan were both pretty good in their instincts re the public. Where’s Reagan when we need him?

Any thoughts on who could be the next Reagan? I was thinking Tom Selleck. Hey, I never claimed to be a political genius. Too bad Gregory Peck’s dead. Uh, I can picture Romney handling this well.

I think Bush was awful busy being a good old Texan and Obama vastly under-estimated the level of commitment to public service it takes to be president and seems to have just thought he could skate by being a sort of celebrity and boss of the world. I see the same confusion and “what the hell?” look I used to see on Carter’s face. Although I would never accuse Jimmy Carter of not being committed to the country.

Now there’s case of an honest man not making it in politics.
Just wandering musings. Where are our statesmen? Where are Louisiana’s leaders? Is James Carville the best they’ve got?
And I bet Carville is ostracized for a good long time for criticizing a Democratic administration.

Wow, bbell, I cannot believe that you really believe that letting people leave an incredibly dangerous flooded area makes them looters, What are you thinking? Ban away. Besides, it takes time to evacuate a city; if you’re at the tail end of the evacuation does that make you worthy of, uh, getting shot in the face? It’s better to leave these people you know nothing about to die? Really? Really? Really? You think this is a good idea?

Back to the worst oil spill in our country’s history. It can be directly traced to the department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP’s lease at Deepwater Horizon a “categorical exclusion” from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 – during the BUSH administration which decided that regulations weren’t really needed in these dangerous deep wells in the Gulf of Mexico, because the companies themselves were best able to determine what was safe.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/04/AR2010050404118.html

This is a good time to have a talk about privatizing profits (BP makes tons of money from its various poorly-regulated operations) and socializing the loses from big businesses. The United States Public is saddled with the tremendous cost when their insufficiently engineered/insufficiently regulated oil well kills 11 people and produces one of the biggest environmental disasters in our history. I just don’t understand this attitude. Lax regulation = more cost to the American taxpayer. Why is this a good thing? Why?

department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP’s lease at Deepwater Horizon a “categorical exclusion” from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 -

bbell, I’m still disturbed by your comment that everyone that hadn’t left New Orleans immediately before or after Hurricane Katrina were stupid. A few of the people trying to leave town and threatening with getting shot were foreign tourists that simply hadn’t been able to leave. May people weren’t able to leave through no fault of their own. This neither makes them stupid, larcenous (your assumption that anyone leaving New Orleans must have been a criminal) , nor worthy of death.

An acoustical switch deadman blow-out preventer could well have prevented this disaster. In 2003, Vice President Cheney’s energy commission recommended that this extra layer of protection (required in most other parts of the world be dropped because it was “to costly.” Sure enough, in 2005, Bush’s Energy bill dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch.

Bush and Cheney systematically weakened regulation on the oil and gas industry. The chickens are coming home to roost, now that they are safely out of the picture.

Please, someone, what exactly has Obama done wrong? Other than allow those permits for wells on the east coast (I was not happy) which have since been rescinded?

Until late Friday, the projected path of the storm was to Florida, Alabama, or Mississippi. Some people went to bed Friday night without knowing of the revised projection, and didn’t learn it was coming to New Orleans until Saturday morning. The storm didn’t reach category 5 until Sunday moring when a mandatory evacuation was ordered. Lots of people have no cars. There’s only three highways inland out of New Orleans. The storm hit very early Monday morning. There’s plenty of reasons besides stupidity why it’s impossible to evacuate a city of that size under those circumstances.

11, Stephen (Some random letter) (Ehesis); I don’t see how the National Government is blowing of Bobby Jindal at all. The guy has made his entire political career on refusing to acknowedge that the national government can do anything useful. Sample quote: “Today in Washington, some are promising that government will rescue us from the economic storms raging all around us,” Jindal said. “Those of us who lived through Hurricane Katrina, we have our doubts.”

“Lax regulation = more cost to the American taxpayer. Why is this a good thing? Why?”

Perhaps because stifling regulation leads to insurmountable cost to the tax payer? Of course, that’s taking your “lax regulation” at face value. I’m sure you’re aware how uncomplicated it is to get an oil well up and running right? There’s not a bit of regulation and heavy taxation involved already. It’s strange someone could look at the tens of thousands of pages of law and tax law that we have, aka regulations, and think it is lax. You’ve created a false dichotomy. The reality is there is heavy regulation, and you’d like more, presumably right up until it is stiffing so it prevents anyone from doing anything unless the can afford have an army of lawyers and departments available to navigate it (hey wait a minute…)

The fact is we have heavy regulation now. It’s not enough, according to some, so it’s now lax. That’s strange because lax means loose. And I’m pretty sure if you and 100 of your friends got together personally setup up an oil well in your back yard you would not be able to navigate the regulations necessary for it to happen. On the other hand, lax would mean you go to the town hall, pay a fee and start drilling. I only point this out to imply what lax means. That’s not what is happening.

I’m not against you here… I’m not sure of the solution. But it’s strange that it’s all someone’s fault and that there just wasn’t enough or the right kind of regulation.

The reality is, our civilization is very reactionary. We move quickly, get vast amount of benefits, and pay a heavy cost, randomly as accidents occur at the margins. You can’t just wish that we did -everything- prudently and cautiously, without also wishing the many benefits we enjoy today were not available to us.

Bring it back to this blog, I’d say from a gospel stand point, we have an obligation to care for those whose lives are impact by this catastrophe. Starting with the families whose lives were lost, and then moving on to those whose livelihoods are affected by it. From there it makes sense to look into practices that can prevent this accident. Such as, if the inspection group was certain the oil well was doing something unsafe in the hours before the explosion, whatever they observed should be put into standard procedure to follow for future/current wells. Unfortunately, this is the way life works: trial and error.

I’m assuming that you didn’t read my post 17 where I mention that the Minerals Management Service (MMS)gave BP’s lease at Deepwater Horizon a “categorical exclusion” from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 – during the BUSH administration which decided that regulations weren’t really needed in these dangerous deep wells in the Gulf of Mexico, because the companies themselves were best able to determine what was safe.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/04/AR2010050404118.html

So, no, there wasn’t oppressive regulation. And because of that, we taxpayers have to pay for the terrible environmental damage being wreaked as we speak.

Or is your comment 27 merely saying that rich, well-connected people should be able to wreak whatever havoc they can manage, being rich and all, and the rest of us should have to pay for it. It was known for about a year that this well had serious problems, and not a single government regulator did anything about it. There was no oversight.

Oh, and drilling a well in someone’s back yard is significantly different than drilling a well deep deep deep in the Gulf Of Mexico. Only one of these activities leads to widespread environmental and economic devastation.

You’re a (I can hardly say it) libertarian and think that all the myriad businesses seriously harmed should just sue British Petroleum? Yeah, really. If you’re not a libertarian, than thank you, and ignore the above paragraphh.

Re: point number one under Katrina. You demonstrate a startling lack of understanding of people less fortunate than yourself. Please explain how thousands of poor people, people who in many cases didn’t even own cars, were supposed to evacuate New Orleans. That may not have been Bush’s fault, but it is blaming the victims of the highest order. Does anyone remember the poor slobs who were unprepared to evacuate Nauvoo in 1846? Why weren’t they ready to go? Why weren’t they prepared to leave? Why aren’t we blaming them even today? Why did those dumb Mormons who had some money and supplies and a wagon go back to rescue them? I would argue that those who went back to get them showed a lot more Christ-like behavior than many modern-day Mormons did regarding the victims of Katrina. Sorry for the rant. I guess I just expect better of my fellow co-religionists.

Ironically, those people in Nauvoo didn’t have cars either. Although, I’m inclined to agree with your main point that we should not blame someone for the misfortune that falls on them when a storm comes, the other side of the coin, that there are many people who could have taken care of themeselves didn’t. And perhaps that was part of the problem. People who could have taken care of themselves didn’t, and the government/societal services were overwhelemed trying to take care of people who should have been able to do it themselves, (in addition to)rather than those who truly could not take care of themselves.

What gets me is that BP seems to be trying their various solutions sequentially. Why aren’t they working on all possibilities at the same time and having them ready to go one after the other? Do you have to know that the top kill failed to put equipment in place to cut the pipe?

djinn, what makes you think you’re going to be banned? The only person I can ever remember getting banned around here was Dan the Democrat, and that took a really long time and didn’t really last in the end. The moral of this story: this isn’t BCC — it’s almost impossible to get banned here.

I agree with you, bbell. Neither Katrina nor the BP oil spill are the President’s fault. This notion that the Federal government or the President or anyone (for that matter) should be our sure and safe barrier from catastrophe is simply bizarre. (Only Jesus can fill this role, and Jesus is not the President; Article II, Section 1 of our Constitution renders him ineligible — so much for omnipotence!)

All of this talk of Presidential responsibility reminds me of the practice of reporting weather in Communist countries. There’s a story that behind the Iron Curtain, for many years the government-run weather stations did not report tornadoes, hurricanes, and other severe weather condition. Apparently, there was this feeling that under a superior regime, bad things just wouldn’t happen, and that had to be reflected with state propaganda. I fear that this blame-game we saw with Bush and that we see with Obama is coming close to saying, “under a good president, nothing bad happens.”

That said, I had to laugh out loud when a Facebook friend set his status to say, “The Democrats taught me that the Vice President controls oil companies and that the President is responsible for Louisiana coastal conditions.” So yeah: It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy or a nicer party.

djinn, you’re acting like a nutcase. You say things like, “The guy has made his entire political career on refusing to acknowedge that the national government can do anything useful. Sample quote: ‘Today in Washington, some are promising that government will rescue us from the economic storms raging all around us,’ Jindal said. ‘Those of us who lived through Hurricane Katrina, we have our doubts.'” This is kind of proof that you’re not dealing with a full deck. Not only does your quote fail to show what you claim it shows, but your accusation about Jindal is a ridiculous straw man of federalism that is typical of the mindless talking points constantly pouring out of fountains of liberal hate-speech like DailyKos or MSNBC.

It takes a special kind of nutty to both (a) offer rote recitals of run-of-the-mill talking points, and (b) do it while frothing at the mouth.

DKL, underwater oil drilling, as we have seem, is extremely dangerous for huge numbers of people that have nothing to do with the drilling, such as all those completely innocent people along the southern coast that are having their livelihoods being ruined because of BP’s actions, not to mention the 11 dead guys. Proper government regulation can vastly reduce the risk of such dangerous tasks. It explicitly didn’t happen in the case of the Deepwater Oil well and we, the American public, are left with this disaster on our hands.

Similarly, proper disaster management can at least help in a catastrophic crisis such as Katrina. Bush stocked the office off disaster managment with cronies that didn’t know a thing about disaster management. Disaster ensued.

Oh, a Random John, I think the BP containment procedures are just straight out theater to show they’re trying eveything they can. Getting the relief wells dug will kill the well. The top kill (in spite of its cool name) had no chance; it has never worked before in such an instance, and the reason why is pretty clear. Imagine trying to turn off a runaway leaky fire hose by pointing another fire hose at it. There just isn’t enough pressure differential between the two firehoses to force water (or drilling mud) down the runaway fire hose to make a difference.

The relief wells are the equivalent of just turning off the leaky runaway fire hose, becaue they pump mud in from the bottom and the pressure of the well itself just sends the mud up until the well is filled.

The fact that they are relying on “theater” to distract the public and the media is bothersome to me. Come up with their best solutions, lay them out, and keep the rest of the crap out of it. If the best solution is “it’s going to take 3-4 months”, then fine.

Queno, they’re playing for the judges/juries in the future suits against them. Truth is not their friend, sadly, especially, since, as far as I can tell, they’ve stopped drilling the second relief well. One out-of-control deep sea gusher required four relief wells. This just makes me to sad to type. Drill, baby, drill. Intersecting an existing well is very very difficult, and is necessary. They’re not concentrating on the right problem (destroying large parts of the gulf estuary) in favor of looking good on TV. LOOK WHAT WE”RE DOING! YEAH US!

I think I should give an opposite shout-out to the Obama administration here–like I said earlier, this well has obviously in trouble for a year, and I haven’t read anything that the Obama admministration has done to tighten up on regulatory requirements in their (brief) tenure. They didn’t make things worse, as the Bush regime clearly and plainly did, but they also didn’t make things better.

DKL, as usual, I have no idea what you are talking about. I believe that a business should pay for its cost of doing business, not the public. British Petroleum has used every trick in the book (and it’s almost as thick as my OED) to avoid this. They despoil the environment, it’s their problem, not mine.

Your Bobby Jindal comments are equally incoherent. The governor has made his career on some sort of fetish that governmental help is unamerican. Woops. Now that he needs it, he asks for it. I don’t read those websites/tv shows you mention — I read much more technical stuff, it it isn’t obvious. Please make a note, and insult me appropriately.

On the topic of banning people, which is entirely off topic: I have personally banned two people that I can recall here at MM. One was a neo-Nazi (banned as soon as I found his comments) and the other was some guy whose name I forget that was commenting several times a day in a ranting incoherent style. We let him go on for weeks and I conversed with him privately several times before banning him.

So yes you can get banned here at MM. But simply disagreeing with the bloggers here even of you’re a jerk about it probably won’t get it done. That said, don’t be a jerk.

a random John, if you feel like I’m being a jerk, please let me know, and I’ll do my best to modify my commenting style. I feel (which, as a personal observation could be 180 degrees wrong) that I match my response to the original post.

Obama may not be to blame for the BP disaster, but he’s done a terrific job of making a joke out of himself and his administration, as Ed Morrissey notes on Hot Air:

Thursday’s announcement [by BP that they’d put a hold on Top-Kill] came just hours before Barack Obama assured Americans that the federal government was completely in charge of the Gulf disaster response, and that BP didn’t do anything without a by-your-leave from Admiral Allen. It then became obvious that BP had interrupted the ‘top kill’ procedure for almost a day without anyone from the government team noticing it. By Friday, most people had already figured out from the live camera that Allen and BP had declared victory much too early, and that the sudden silence afterward meant that Plan B had already failed. This just confirms what was plain to see on Friday.

We haven’t seen a president behaving this stupidly since the J. Earl Carter administration.

I fail to see how the top kill failing is Obama’s fault. No, really. Last time I checked he wasn’t a drilling engineer. And Jimmy Carter was a great, prescient president. Too bad we didn’t listen to him.

I wonder how severe the real, non-political impact of this spill will be. Natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico release 80,000 to 200,000 tonnes (0.5 to 1.3 million barrels) of oil each year. (link) Estimates for the BP leak seem to run between 20,000 and 100,000 barrels per day. This comes to mind because of the reminder a few weeks ago that after Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4 exploded and destroyed every living molecule within 300 miles, or something like that, somehow power workers kept showing up each day and running the other three units for another 14 years.

djinn, where exactly do I blame Obama for the failure of top-killing? What I do is ridicule him for looking foolish for announcing that he was 100% in charge, and then proceeding to tout the success of strategies that BP had publicly announced as failures just hours before. Drop the knee-jerk reliance upon straw men, and you’ll get a lot farther.

Dan, I’m glad you can admit to the hatred that you brought to bear on the 2008 election cycle. That is, I believe, the 1st step toward healing.

Djinn, you should know that Dan received many very specific warnings about his comments before he was banned. Never was the raw stupidity of his comments an issue, because we have enough faith in our readers to know that they’re smart enough to assess such things on their own. One major problem was that he began frequently posting comments that were little more than very, very long excerpts from content published elsewhere on the net.

The government has one undeniably great thing in forcing BP to drill a second relief well.

I fail to see how a government official screwing up the announcement timing of the end of an oil spill disaster makes Obama “a president behaving this stupidly since J. Earl Carter.”

This is not to say that I don’t think the Government should take a harder line with BP (for example, I think they should be forced to dig a third relief well and should not be allowed to use the Coast Guard as seemingly their private police force, they should be forced to allow their workers to wear respirators….. the list goes on, but such vitriol for such a minor error that had absolutely no effect. Now, the considerable loosening up of offshore oil regulations during the Bush years had a direct effect on this tragedy.

One last comment–I read about those workers at Chernobyl, and I don’t think that’s something we want to emulate. They’d work for a few months for a fair amount of pay, and still end up with horrific radiation exposure.

This is the first smart thing I’ve read by David Brooks in more than a decade:

Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America’s inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country’s inability to govern itself. The plume taps into a series of deep anxieties. First, it taps into the anxiety that the people running our major institutions are just not that competent. Second, it feeds into the anxiety that there has been an unhappy marriage between corporations and government officials, which has had the effect of corrupting both. Most important, the plume exposes the country’s core confusion about the role of government